The reputation of Gone With The Wind began its decline a little more than three years ago. The campaign began with former N.Y Post critic Lou Lumenick calling its “undeniably racist” attitudes no longer tolerable in our current socio-political climate. This was reiterated last August when the Orpheum theatre in Memphis said it would no longer show Gone With The Wind after receiving complaints about the 1939 film being “insensitive”, etc.
Now a Reddit piece offers further proof of how yellowed and moth-eaten Gone With The Wind is by the current calendar. With Margaret Mitchell‘s story spanning the years 1861 to 1873, David O. Selznick‘s film is now slightly closer to the Civil War era it portrays than to the present day. The film opened 78 and 1/2 years ago (i.e., December 1939) while the timeline of the film (which begins in April 1861) began just shy of 79 years before that event.
The author of the eight-day-old Reddit piece, “u/RespectMyAuthoriteh,” goes on to explain in detail how phenomenal the popularity of Gone With The Wind was, considering the intense competition from other films. Example #1: “From the ’20s to mid ’50s seven major Hollywood studios were grinding out 25 to 40 movies per annum,” etc. Example #2: “Gone With The Wind finally left theaters in late 1941. But it was such a huge hit, it was already resurrected for a revival run in March 1942, just three or four months later. It ran on Broadway for two years straight. That’s why GWTW‘s run is so impressive. There has never been anything like it before or since, with the possible exception of Star Wars.”